Bradley's narrative mixes mythic, historical, and fictive characters and settings to create an atmosphere in which the imaginative and the factual worlds meet, like the seen and unseen world which provide her background. The Ladies and their warriors are chiefly Bradley's own —except for Viviane, who appears in the Arthurian legends, and Marcus Aurelia Musaeus Carausius,a historical character who did become Emperor, as well as Allectus and the other Briton chieftains, like Ambrosius Aurelianus and his rival Vortigern. The Druids are of course fictional, but certain of the Christians, like Bishop Germanus, are historical. Behind the chief players and places during the years of the novel, A.D. 96, when Caillean established Avalon, and the ascendance of Viviane, Daughter of Avalon, said to occur in A.D. 45, stand the ancestors, both mythic and historical, whose spirits are reborn as destiny calls them in—Boudicca of the...